Media Mirrors: how 21st century film and television represent themselves Film Studies Speaker Series: Jason Mittell, Professor of Film and Media Culture, Middlebury College

Contemporary media has embraced reflexivity as a dominant facet of storytelling. From the popularity of mockumentary sitcoms to films about filmmaking, from reality television hoaxes to found footage horror, watching film and television fiction frequently asks us to consider how media represents its own creation and consumption. In this lecture, Jason Mittell, Professor of Film and Media Culture at Middlebury College, will discuss his new project, which grapples with these phenomena to explore how reflexive media work for both creators and consumers, considering how we can make sense of these forms as narrative strategies and cultural objects.

Jason Mittell arrived at Middlebury in 2002 after two years teaching at Georgia State University. He is the author of Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (Routledge, 2004), Television and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2010), Complex Television: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling (NYU Press, 2015) and Narrative Theory and ADAPTATION (Bloomsbury, 2017), co-author with Christian Keathley and Catherine Grant of The Videographic Essay, and the co-editor of How to Watch Television (NYU Press, 2013; second edition, 2020).

Jason maintains the blog Just TV. His research interests include television history and criticism, media and cultural history, narrative theory, genre theory, videographic criticism, animation and children's media, videogames, digital humanities, and new media studies and technological convergence. He is Project Manager for [in]Transition, a journal of videographic criticism, and co-leader of the NEH-sponsored digital humanities workshop, Scholarship in Sound & Image, a two-week intensive workshop focused on producing video-based scholarly criticism since 2015.